On The Border: Barriers, Passages, Journeys

A border is a place of encounter, a place as encounter.1 Powerful encounters, interesting conversations, political and cultural tension take place on the border. To be on the border is to be at the edge, on the brink, in a place via which one passes to another place. In terms of extent, too, the border is a critical concept. It is a limit that divides the refined from the crude, laughter from gravity, the permitted from the forbidden. Both formally and esthetically, then, the border sets up two poles representing a dichotomy of values in which worse is less good and saner is less mad. We can express this dichotomy in behavioral-experiential terms if we understand the border as signifying containment – the border as a halt, an obstacle, a last restraint before an outburst, a perversion, a distortion, or the loss of wits. It follows that the border is supposed to be on the edge, the tip of the tongue, on the verge of. It is a state of transition involving loss and liberation, release and trance, digression from the usual, familiar self. As such, a border not only lies outside, between things, but is also internalized socially, psychologically, and intellectually. In what way does the phrase “being on the border” differ from simply “the border”? There are always borders, barricades, walls, and crossings. To be on the border, in a borderline state, however, is a rare experience; at least, the awareness of it is rare, perhaps because it requires great concentration, greater than in situations far from the border. Being on the border carries the risk of ejection from the soothing waters of the usual. We tend to construct and maintain borders that we do not inhabit. On the contrary, they distance us from ourselves, by surrounding us, delineating a horizon, forming a conceptual skeleton around which we create a world and wrap ourselves with it, live in it as within an enclosed sphere, rather than on the brink of empty space. Alfred Schutz, in the manner of his teacher Edmund Husserl, described this imaginary, shared world as a universe of meaning, perpetuating itself as self-explanatory, a “taken-for-granted-world,” endowed with a patina of familiarity covering or even permeating realness and restraining, habituating, and domesticating it.2 Sometimes the habitual order is disrupted, as when people find themselves on opposite sides of a border that was suddenly brought to the fore. The border may have always been there, but it is now exposed, overriding anything else. It overwhelms the existing routine and becomes the focus of the relationship; every action, every